Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Now that 2011 has come and gone, I've decided to take some time before heading back to work to come up with some New Year's resolutions for 2012. I've never had much luck in the past with keeping resolutions, so my first resolution is to only resolve to do things that I stand half a chance of achieving. That being said... I resolve to lose 20 pounds by the end of the year. This sounds hard but isn't. What's hard is keeping it off. Amazon's MP3 store has a slew of weigh-loss auto-suggestion audio files which you listen to while going to sleep at night. I managed to lose about 10 pounds before the holidays doing this - time to get back on track. I resolve to paint more. I've got a MFA in painting, and these days I hardly ever pick up a brush. To go along with that... I resolve to clean out my studio and keep it clean . This means getting rid of a ridiculous amount of crap that currently live in my studio. The problem is that I'm a world class pack ...

Traditionally songs about Thanksgiving focus on the harvest and gathering of family: "Come Ye Thankful People Come," "We gather together," and so on. Today, families are often far-flung and distant. This is the first year neither of my two sons will be coming home for Thanksgiving. The youngest is spending the holiday with a college friend in upstate New Jersey (the rural, "Garden State" part, not the petrochemical part), and the oldest is in Antarctica. Though not really a Thanksgiving song, I've had the Beatles standard "In My Life," on my mind today; it's a song about looking back on the people we aren't with. There are places I remember All my life, though some have changed Some forever not for better Some have gone and some remain All these places had their moments With lovers and friends I still can recall Some are dead and some are living In my life I've loved them all But of all these friends and lovers There is no o...

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I noticed where the recent production of "Atlas Shrugged, Part 1," will be released on DVD and Blu ray tomorrow. Get ready to relive the excitement of the first third of Ayn Rand's colossal door stop again and again. Since I never saw it, (nor plan to), I'm hardly qualified to offer up any meaningful criticism. I'll leave that to the good reviewers on Amazon's website . Not unsurprisingly, fans are once again using this a forum to accuse the professional critics who panned this epic of all sorts of dastardly liberal bias (imagine that). They've racked up the ratings to an average 4 stars (out of 5). Sample comment: "The movie is well made - the quality is actually quite good. Acting was generally good to excellent. Camera work was good; although the low budget resulted in a missing camera angle here and there. Special effects were consistently well done. The story, of course, is exceptional; and it is well-told in this movie." Hmm...if...

A couple of decades ago I was noodling around on my guitar and remembered a lick from a song my old high school buddy Chuck Niebling used to play. It had a lilting, slightly melancholy sound. The lyrics (I can never remember words) had something to do with leaving home. That's all I could recall about it. I've played that 24 bar phrase on and off ever since; searching through the repertoires of every obscure and not so obscure 60's and 70's folkie I could think of -- to no avail. I've been totally stumped ... until today. I was listening to a new download I'd gotten from Amazon featuring Jorma Kaukonen and David Bromberg (highly recommended, by the way) and was struck by a tune Bromberg sang. I went back to Amazon to check out some of his other CDs, clicked on a selection and --- OMG! MY MYSTERY SONG! It was called " Child's Song, " and was written by Canadian Murray McLaughlin. More research revealed the version my friend Chuck had perform...

I'd gotten an invite for Google Music a month or two ago but hadn't done much with it until recently. The other day I logged in again and started playing with it again. Here's a few notes for those who are interested in that sort of thing. Here's the short version: Google Music is cloud-based music streaming service, which you can use to upload (I hesitate to say "store" for reasons I'll describe later) and playback MP3s. You get to store 20,000 files, apparently regardless of size. Right now it's in Beta with limited availability (get in line and wait for an invite). It's similar to what Amazon recently launched and what Apple seems to hope iCloud will be. I don't want to call this "cloud storage," because, although you can upload music to play back, there's no way to natively download it - so you won't be using it to back up your music collection. So far it's a one-way street. That being said, I've seen a coup...

Woot has a short video editorial on the subject of Martinis, to which I say, as a confirmed Martini drinker, "A - freaking - men." Preach on, brother Beetle!